Cill Dairbhre · Co. Cork
A hilltop crossroads village with one wide street, a view to the Galtees, and the lost house of Elizabeth Bowen down the road.
Kildorrery is a small village in the foothills above the Galtee Mountains - not in them, above them, on a hilltop plateau that gives it a long view in every direction. North you get the Galtees and the Ballyhouras, east the Knockmealdowns and Slievenamon in the haze, and south the Nagle mountains across the Blackwater valley. The land around is dairy country, and the village runs on it.
The shape of the place is the work of the Earl of Kingston, who in the 1780s spent some of his hundred thousand acres rebuilding the local villages with a wide street and two-storey houses. That street is still the village - a strong line of attractive frontages, a shop, a petrol station, a couple of pubs, hair salons, a bakery, a vet, the kind of working spine a North Cork village keeps. The ruined medieval church, going back to around 1200 and burnt in a local dispute in 1321, still stands in the graveyard. The Catholic church of St Bartholomew, built in 1838, replaced it.
What gives Kildorrery its quiet fame is two kilometres up the road at Farahy. Bowen's Court was the Anglo-Irish house where the novelist Elizabeth Bowen grew up and to which she returned to write. She sold it in 1959, a local buyer demolished it in 1960, and she wrote that it was a clean end - that the house never lived to be a ruin. Only a gateway is left. The tiny Protestant church of St Colman at the old gates survives, and she is buried in its churchyard. There is a service for her there each September.
It is a working village, not a tourist one, and it does not pretend otherwise. You come here for the view, the Bowen connection, a plate of food at the Thatch and Thyme, and the road on to Mitchelstown or Mallow. Most days, most people just pass through the crossroads. The ones who stop tend to be glad they did.